Please note: we have been online over ten years, and we want The Trek BBS to continue as a free site. But if you block our ads we are at risk.Please consider unblocking ads for this site - every ad you view counts and helps us pay for the bandwidth that you are using. Thank you for your understanding.

Welcome! The Trek BBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans. Please login to see our full range of forums as well as the ability to send and receive private messages, track your favourite topics and of course join in the discussions.

If you are a new visitor, join us for free. If you are an existing member please login below. Note: for members who joined under our old messageboard system, please login with your display name not your login name.

I do like the idea of Chakotay being a captain, he was so underdeveloped over the whole series that a change like that might have helped him step up, making Tuvok the first officer.

I could certainly see Chakotay and Tuvok butting heads a lot more than Janeway and Chakotay did...which was almost never (so far in my watch). But at this point, I can't see Voyager without Janeway permanently. And anyway, I think they could have further developed Chakotay without killing her off.

The only way I could see Janeway being killed off is in the series finale if somehow she sacrificed herself so the rest of the crew could make it back home. Then they have a big memorial service, and they name ships and haircuts after her and whatnot.

But an even better ending would be if she ended up stranded in the DQ while the rest of the crew made it back home. That would be the ultimate justice coming full circle after her decision in the first episode. Tying a nice bow around it. Well, it would be a "valentine" for me anyway.

MakeshiftPython wrote:

Funny thing, I just finished "In the Flesh" last night as well. I'm not sure how 8472 would have worked if they kept them as antagonists. It was very expensive back in the 90s to pull that off

Yep, good point. I don't know, perhaps showing them in other forms since they're able to do that with their genetic altering gizmos? But it would be hard to do an entire season with just them, you're right.

By the way, after they extracted Chakotay's DNA, I thought they were going to put a Chakotay look-alike on Voyager while holding the real Chakotay prisoner, kind of like what the Founders did with Bashir on DS9. But I certainly got that wrong. Instead it was a negotiated ending that seemed all to friendly, quick and easy to me.

"Lost ship going home" just isn't sustainable for more than 2 seasons. It's too nebulous to really drive the show, and TBH it's just them taking what already happened to Kirk and Picard and trying to stretch out a one episode plot into an entire series.

Plus, it's "Gilligan Syndrome". You KNOW all their attempts to go home before the finale will fail, otherwise the show would be over because they never gave them any other plots.

What the show would've benefited from was having plots that could drive the series and be accomplished WITHOUT ending the show.

The series really would've been more interesting if they had to settle down somewhere because the ship was too damaged. Build a home, establish relationships with the locals, even tenatively start building a "new Federation." That kind of stuff would've been interesting than "will they get home?" when you know the answer is always "NOOOO!!!"

The series really would've been more interesting if they had to settle down somewhere because the ship was too damaged. Build a home, establish relationships with the locals, even tenatively start building a "new Federation." That kind of stuff would've been interesting than "will they get home?" when you know the answer is always "NOOOO!!!"

Oh boy, I can hear some Trekkies now...

But if they land on a planet and just stay there, that's not "Star Trek!"

Well, I definitely like that idea. And when they get to the planet, their phasers, tricorders, nothing works because of something in the atmosphere. So they have to "live off the land" until they figure out how to "compensate" or discover some way to make them work, which happens many episodes later -- not in the same episode. Then at the end of the season (or end of the series) they're able to finally repair their ship, leave the planet and set a course for home...and maybe some of them decide to stay behind because it feels like a home. And that could have led to another spin-off with those who stayed behind eventually creating a base for a new Federation in the Delta quadrant. Again though, not "Star Trek."

The series really would've been more interesting if they had to settle down somewhere because the ship was too damaged. Build a home, establish relationships with the locals, even tenatively start building a "new Federation." That kind of stuff would've been interesting than "will they get home?" when you know the answer is always "NOOOO!!!"

But then that reminds everybody of what "Lost in Space" did back in the 60s. Neelix would have started some sort of garden, and we would have had a VOY version of LIS: The Great Vegetable Rebellion.

Voyager works just fine as the ship-based Serialized Procedural it is.

__________________Starbuck: We're all friendlies. So, let's just... be friendly.
"There is no 'supposed to be.' It's an adaptation, a word that literally means change. Why bother making a new version if it doesn't offer a fresh approach?" - Christopher L. Bennett

In the first they found a planet, built a colony, lived there for a year without incident until the Toasters found them, and enslaved the last human beings like cattle and all seemed lost.

In the second, just like Enterprise Squared, or DS9 Children of Time, after a faulty Stargate twinned the crew, they went back in time a thousand years and built a vast star flung civilization that numbered into the billions spanning dozens of planets, however a super volcano, natural forces, frakked their home-world, and still years later after a supposed successful exodus, the past finally caught up to the present, where the duplicates (Equally real counterparts?) begin finding the devastated ruins of the worlds they seem to be responsible for the erecting of, wondering why all the statues look like they do, and they get simultaneous judgy and melancholic.

Both these stories took 4 or 5 episodes to tell that spanned a season or two.

But you saw what happened when they tried that one Battlestar Galactica or Star Gate Universe... The other shoe dropped.

Farscape dropped Crichton's quest to get home and switched to the Wormhole/Peacekeeper-Scarran War storyline and no one complained.

Instead of landing on a planet, they could've just had the series take place in one general area where the Kazon, Krenim, Vidiians, Hirogen, Malon, etc all co-existed in and then had VOY be about them trying to pull various aliens they encountered together into a Delta Federation to fight off the Borg and 8472.

Christopher did something kind of similar to what you guys are talking about with his story Places of Exile, but while the concept works well as a literary work, it wouldn't have worked as well in the visual medium, nor would it have been practical from a production standpoint to have built all these ship-board sets only to suddenly and permanently abandon them.

Furthermore, Voyager, as I said, already works perfectly fine as-is, especially if you're not viewing it 'piecemeal' and at random.

__________________Starbuck: We're all friendlies. So, let's just... be friendly.
"There is no 'supposed to be.' It's an adaptation, a word that literally means change. Why bother making a new version if it doesn't offer a fresh approach?" - Christopher L. Bennett

Well, if the series was about them staying in the same general area of space instead of being always on the move, it would mean they'd keep using the Ship sets and also get to keep reusing the sets they made for the various aliens who would now no longer be one-shots.

But you saw what happened when they tried that one Battlestar Galactica or Star Gate Universe... The other shoe dropped.

Farscape dropped Crichton's quest to get home and switched to the Wormhole/Peacekeeper-Scarran War storyline and no one complained.

Instead of landing on a planet, they could've just had the series take place in one general area where the Kazon, Krenim, Vidiians, Hirogen, Malon, etc all co-existed in and then had VOY be about them trying to pull various aliens they encountered together into a Delta Federation to fight off the Borg and 8472.

@Anwar: The thing about spin-offs of any given franchise is that each installment ideally needs to have something about it that sets it apart, and if Voyager had just been about the ship staying in one general area, it would've basically been TOS Mark III (with TNG more or less being TOS Mark II). It probably could've worked as 'TOS Mark III', but at a certain point would probably have begun to feel repetitive and a major step backwards from the evolutionary experiment that was DS9.

As-is, Voyager took the serialization introduced into the franchise with DS9 and combined it with the episodic elements of TOS and TNG to create the franchise's first Serialized Procedural, which does set it apart and give it its own distinct qualities and 'feel'.

__________________Starbuck: We're all friendlies. So, let's just... be friendly.
"There is no 'supposed to be.' It's an adaptation, a word that literally means change. Why bother making a new version if it doesn't offer a fresh approach?" - Christopher L. Bennett

Putting together an Alliance to fight off an extradimensional threat sounds pretty unique as a series plot for Trek, considering most of the time said Alliances have already been formed. Especially when the folks in question had no power base to begin with. Seeing all that being built up would've been enough to set it apart. It would've been a way of combining TNG and DS9's approaches. Planets of the Week that later come together into a stationary plot.

The whole "Lost in Space" thing just isn't sustainable for more than 2 seasons. Even the VOY writers themselves knew this, which is why when Braga came on he wanted to do new ideas like "Year of Hell" and the 8472 aliens and stuff.